A creator-marketing platform predating the term "influencer" goes fully agentic

Upfluence, founded in 2013 before "influencer marketing" was a phrase, has shifted to a fully agentic business powered by an agentic system called Jaice. CEO Vivien Garnès told AdExchanger the system now handles the whole creator-partnership lifecycle: writing a brief, contacting relevant creators and negotiating rates. Marketers upload a brand's website, Jaice scrapes it and any public historical data to understand the audience and estimate what a collaboration might cost, then asks the advertiser anything it cannot determine through a chat interface. Campaign creation, Garnès argues, is made of dozens of "micro decisions" where "there's an objective best answer" an AI can determine. Upfluence is also a two-way marketplace with native Shopify and WooCommerce integrations for closed-loop tracking. The pitch is selectivity, not scale: "Our job is not to have a bigger haystack," Garnès said. "It's to find the needles."

The crux

Agentic automation has now reached the human-relationship layer of marketing (negotiating creator rates and writing briefs), not just media buying, a signal that agent-to-agent and agent-to-creator workflows are becoming the default operating mode rather than a novelty.

Sell-side read

If an agent can negotiate creator rates, it can negotiate publisher inventory and data deals, which means the sell-side should expect agentic buyers to push on price transparency and structured, machine-readable terms. Publishers who expose clean, structured rates and inventory are the ones agentic buyers will clear first.

Watch

Whether agentic negotiation spreads from creator marketing into publisher direct and programmatic deals within two quarters, and whether buyers route through platform-owned agents (which optimise for platform revenue) or independent ones.